Yeah, I'm not going to go into a frenzy of misquoting here or anything, but George Carlin (may he rot in peace) had a whole routine about how the idea that humans are ruining the planet is the most arrogant thing imaginable. The planet's fine. The people are fucked. That about sums it up...

Jeez, this is the most asinine thread I've ever read. We start with some tasteless jokes about dying animals and end up with the argument that it's all no big deal because a little coastal flooding now and then is good. Let's not deal with the hard stuff, like the extinction of thousands of species, the loss of cropland, the reversal of the carbon cycle, increase in catastrophic weather, and the faint (but real) possibility that the whole thing will cycle out of control and render the planet uninhabitable. No, that would require giving up some smugness. And we at Slashdot value our smugness!

Alas, I hail from an earlier time, when people thought that what they did mattered, and that the future was somehow our responsibility.

Fear not my contentious friend, when a massive die off of humanity roles over our planet it will take such slacker attitudes with it as it passes. The fewer other humans are left, the more important the contributions of each remaining human become. Reputation, not just for quality of work, but for quality of character will be far more important in a world where it is possible to know everyone who lives in your community. When a person's best and worst qualities both get lost in the crowd the slacker approach makes sense. A few decades of stringent, nature enforced Darwinism might do well to counter our current trend of dysgenics. [youtube.com] Humanity thrives in challenging situations... at least the survivors do.

What the fuck does it matter? Some women can work as managers and there are black accountants now, great. Do you think that's a victory on the same scale as stopping your generation from annihilating the human population of Earth?

I used to read this propoganda all the time in Australian papers, less so since the change of government. In reality the US is now the only nation on Earth not willing to sign up to an international treaty. For the past several years China and India's simple negotiating strategy [youtube.com] has been..."we want what the same deal as the US plus the compenstation for past emmisions the rest of the world has already ageed to".

Two basic ideas of the draft treaty [unfccc.int]...
1. Cap and trade (based on tonnage not GDP as the US wants) is the way to go, currently we emmit 10Gt/yr of GHG and the best scientific advise says it would be prudent to reduce that to 3-4Gt/yr by 2050-60. The best economic advise says the sooner we take our medicine the better. The obvious way to do this is start with 10Gt of permits in year 1 and reduce that to 3-4 by mid-century, the hard part is not the technology it's the allocation and accountability of permits. Permits are allocated to national governments once a year who then auction/sell/hoard them ( a decent government would use it to offset other taxes ). For those caught cheating sanctions/tarrifs are applied to their inputs/outputs. Estimated cost per ton of the permits varies between $20-200 depending on what global development senario you belive in.
2. The treaty is designed to account for the fact that early FF users (US/Russia/EU/Japan/Au) have already benifited from past emmisions. The per-capita emmission curves for different nations are drawn to account for these past emmisions and merge into a single curve by ~2030. Between now and 2030 China and India will have steep curves, OTOH if they can flatten out their curves by undertaking huge renewable efforts earlier rather than later then they will be compensated by auctioning their permits to other nations.

The basic problem with the draft treaty...
Creative accounting.

"How about giving up our panic attacks."
Agreed, but for a while there it looked like "the economy would be ruined".

Polar bears already have problems. Ice freezes later and thaws sooner, so bears have to swim further and many drown. Seals, their primary food source, are also under pressure because they need the ice to birth. Your wiki source also includes this [wikipedia.org]:

The IUCN now lists global warming as the most significant threat to the polar bear, primarily because the melting of its sea ice habitat reduces its ability to find sufficient food. The IUCN states, "If climatic trends continue polar bears may become extirpated from most of their range within 100 years."[1] On May 14, 2008, the United States Department of the Interior listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, the National Geographic was a little glib, if not intentionally missleading, when it said:

The melt would be mostly symbolicâ"thicker ice, pushed against the Canadian continental shelf by weather and Earth's rotation, would still survive the summer."

Any reasonable person quickly realizes there will be no ice to "push" if it's all gone in the center. Models that have not predicted the rapidity of ice loss need to be recalibrated as do politicians who deny global warming and it's impact. The alarmists are alarmingly correct.

We're taking billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. Are you so confident that this will have no effect on climate that you're willing to bet billions of lives on it? That seems crazy to me. Climatologists have actually done the math and generally agree that the risk is significant. What is the downside in proactively reducing fossil fuel consumption? We're going to have to reduce fossil fuel consumption eventually anyway (as the high-quality near-surface stuff runs out) so getting started early and possibly avoiding an immense global disaster seems only prudent.

Citation?So many people toss around opinions without backup here I've given up on listening since the whole thing is such a hotpotato.

And anyways, massive coastal flooding only happens if the south pole melts (because it's actually on land). If you fill a glass with water and ice, just to the point of overflowing on the edges, and cubes are sticking out the top, when that ice melts, does your glass of water overflow? Same concept with the north pole here.

Ice displaces a volume of water equal to it's weight. So (discounting the whole mass vs weight thingy) a chunk of ice weighing a kilogram will displace a volume of water weighing a kilogram. Conveniently, this is a litre. So a kilogram of ice displaces a litre of water. Now when a kilogram of ice melts, it becomes a kilogram of water, which has a volume of one litre, which is exactly what was displaced by the ice. Thus the level does not go up or down.

Except that the above assumes fresh water. Salt water is denser than fresh water, so a kilogram sized chunk of ice will displace LESS than a litre of salt water. When that kilo of ice melts, it adds a litre of fresh water to the salt water. Thus the overall quantity of water goes up. So, when the Northern ice cap melts, there will be a rise in the ocean levels.

Your remark interests me cause as a relative new slashdot member, I noticed that one of the main things I love about the threads here is the wonderful intermixing between jokes, facts, irony, wisdom and sarcasm.

Your reasonably funny joke, gave someone else the opportunity to spread a fact he's been sitting on for years. Besides all the funny guys, there are a lot of smart people dwelling here, and I for one welcome the knowledge especially in this intermixed way.

The climate changes we are experiencing will likely take millions of lives. Few people realize how easily diseases like malaria might thrive if we go up even one or two degrees in average temperatures. Florida already has a few cases of malaria every year. The fear that other tropical plagues might become common inside the US mainland is very real.

30 years ago there were a couple articles in popular magazines pointing out that up until 10,000 years ago, Europe an North America underwent repeated, frequent ice ages. They had not measured the Earth cooling in the 30 years prior. Gerald Ford did not get an Ocscar or a Nobel Prize for a movie about Global Cooling. Global cooling was never taken seriously then in the way that global warming now is.

Now we have measured the Earth warming. We have tried to model it, and the only reasonable explanation is human emissions of greenhouse gases. It now appears the North Pole will melt this year.

How much longer do you want to wait for "definitive evidence" that global warming is happening, and that we're causing it? Until drought wrecks the farm economy of California? Until Florida disappears back into the ocean? Until the oil and the coal runs out, and there's no longer economic incentive for people to stick their heads in the sand?

Yes. No one credible believes that we are entirely responsible for the climate change, on the other hand no one credible disputes that we are contributing to it. No matter what the cause, the increased global temperature is a bad thing for us and thus it is in our best interest to stop contributing to the change ASAP.

Not only that, but leaving the question of climate change aside, doesn't "green" make sense?

Adding insulation, better windows, more efficient air conditioner, florescent lights, and so on makes my home more valuable. It also reduces my electric bill, which means more money in my pocket. Same for cars. Less pollution is a side effect, albeit a good one. More to the point it lowers my gasoline consumption, again, more money in my pocket. And I happen to like clean air, so bonus!

Argue climate change all you want, green makes sense, if only from an economic standpoint. And why would anyone be against clean air and water?

I rather agree with you--people should stop kidding themselves. Global warming is not about saving the planet--this stuff has happened repeatedly and all this life is still here--its about saving humanity. Because if the other species out there that we require start dying off because there's too much C02 or its too hot or the ocean is to acidic, then we're screwed unless we can evolve fast enough. It gives a lot of credence to the idea of being stewards of the planet, since at this point we are realizing that what we do/can/ have an effect on the planet as a whole. At this point, we've already worried about polluting the world's oceans, causing worldwide nuclear winter, and now global warming. Either way, it seems to me that carbon is too good of an energy transport to give up, so we should leverage it. Biofuels anyone? What if I said we genetically engineered algae to make them for us? Well, sure, not yet, but that's the logical next step.

Money quote: "and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming."

Not that this is Scientific American talking here, which is hardly a hotbed of AGW skepticism, to put it extremely mildly.

So "just" clean up all those dirty soot-emitting Chinese factories, and the Arctic will start freezing more.

This policy has the advantage of being A Really Fucking Good Idea(TM) whether you're a true believer in AGW all the way over to denying it completely.

Of course, in the real world, not only do we not discuss China's possible particulate-based contribution to GW, we even exempt them from even discussions about adhering to Kyoto, despite the fact that they've been the largest global C02 emitter two years running now and the rate of increase is accelerating...

The freeze/thaw of the arctic is clearly cyclic. Whether it is clear evidence of global warming or not is a question to be considered. Man's impact on this warming, if the warming is actually happening, is another question altogether.

After the ice melts, the poles flip. Eventually we'll be in the next iceage... It has nothing to due with my SUV or your solar panels, it is the nature of the cycle of destruction. After the mass extinction, the strong will survive and slowly rebuild. Our Children and generations more will forget what came before. They will worship our relics and call God by his new name: ComPewTur

That's consistent. A lot of the ice we have is thin, the result of only one season of accumulation. The observation that it's covering more area than last year is consistent with the observation that it's melting fast and the extrapolation that it could be gone by September.

I just finished reading 1421, and my completely-layman, don't-know-enough-history-to-comment opinion was that it was interesting (and, sure, possible), but the author seemed to play pretty fast and loose with his evidence. Some of his claims (like the idea that the Bimini Road [wikipedia.org] was a construction to slide ships back into deeper water after repair) sounded pretty outlandish and not well researched. Others, such as his analysis of old maps and the routes ships would have taken, seemed plausible, but I don't have the background to evaluate them.

I've been looking for a good analysis of his claims, but haven't been able to find much beyond "he got detail X wrong, so it's all bogus." I'd like to read some better thought out critiques. If you have any links handy, I'd be much obliged.

Most of the 1421 theory revolves around a map that seems to detail North America in some fashion. However, that map was proven inaccurate as the mapping around the area it was purported to come from was WORSE than the mapping of North American, which makes no cartographic sense.
People have better maps of where they come from and worse maps of where they just explored. Makes sense. Until somebody can find more proof to back up the 1421 claim, it is an undecidable as to its veracity.

OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1852. The OED is firm in dismissing one often-heard view of its origin, from the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. It says firmly "no such word appears to be attested in Dutch" but points to the very similar word poppekak, which appears only in the old set phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, meaning to show excessive religious zeal, but which literally means "as fine as powdered doll shit". The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community.

The first half of the word is the Dutch pop for a doll, which may be related to our term of endearment, poppet; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century.

Despite some uninformed speculation, there's no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that's a load of old cock), as that's a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel.

Fuck if I know. I guess the media likes people with name recognition. "This guy wrote Jurassic Park, he must know what he's talking about!" "Yeah, well, this guy used to be Vice President! He must know what he's talking about even more!"

Al Gore is just an environmentalist and a politician. In terms of delivering facts about climate change, he's not relevant. I'm not quite sure why he does so much speaking about it -- often scientific ideas are presented by non-scientists, but then, at least, they should be chosen for their charisma.

True... now here's the converse: Al Gore is no climatologist, either - but that didn't stop him from writing a book and being pointed at as some sort of authority on climate by the populace at large.

Not trying to pick a debate, but I do want to point out something.

It doesn't require any sort of degree to use logic in order to take what's out there data-wise, and form a hypothesis (or opinion) that can withstand scrutiny. All that is required is logical skill, intellect, a lot of research, a little wisdom, and patience enough to see the argument (pro or con) come together.

I honestly don't care about who advances the opinion, I care about the logical progression of the argument. I also care about whether or not the supporting facts are as complete as possible, in context, and not in disregard of facts which oppose the conclusion. See also the reasons why ad hominem and appeals to authority are counted as fallacious.

I have some serious questions for you:
1) Do you believe that Michael Crichton has information that the climate scientists do not?
2) Do you believe Michael Crichton is smarter than the climate scientists and better able to interpret the data?
3) If either of these is true, what leads you to believe this?

These climatologists you speak of think they understand and can control a complex system like the world's climate.

Well, what would have given them all that hubris? Possibly scientific education and specialisation? Years spent studying the planet's climate?

Crichton is correct that complex systems are not simple [...]

Well no shit Sherlock.

[...] and [Crichton is correct that complex systems] cannot controlled.

As a PhD in control theory, I can solemnly declare you a charlatan. Space shuttles are controlled. Nuclear fission reactions are controlled (and they are both nonlinear and unstable). Hell even chaotic systems are controlled. And I am supposed to believe a Sci-Fi writer that has been called a moron by every competent climatologist that hey, you can't help complex stuff? I don't believe in penis-enlargement pills, therefore I don't believe in Michael Crichton.

Your foolish statement may be reworded as "Since you cannot understand a system as complex as the human body, you cannot possibly cure people".

Watch the video, he explains it better than I can: [...]

You know, I have this sick, sad habit of looking at politically incorrect sites. Nazis, racists, holocaust deniers—it's a little philosophical exercise, to think how the would would be absurd if these retards actually were right. There is however a line to draw, and Crichton, in that video, passed it after five minutes, when he said that Chernobyl was not really that much of a disaster because only "50 people died". Such a claim indicates a spectacular level of intellectual dishonesty: he's counting only the firefighters who died in the accident, and since nobody traced the isotopes, well, all those malformed children born in Belarus, all those cases of thyroid cancer, they could all just be a statistical anomaly, right? And that's only counting deaths, the really alarming numbers are the people who develop conditions because of the poisoning: in the Ukraine alone, the authorities estimate that 2.4 millions people [www.rfi.fr] were affected by the radiation. Note that Ukraine did not even get most of the fallout, Belarus did.

Well, that's enough to make up my mind for now: he's a shill paid by industry lobbyists to deliver lies. Call me up when they actually find a climatologist backing him up.

Anyone who believes this isn't a man-made disaster has their speaking privileges taken away. Put on your dunce caps, go sit in the corner and shut the f&*k up.

Yes, absolutely. Instead of believing the propaganda from Big Oil that nothing is wrong, we should instead believe in the propaganda from political interests attempting to divert our attention from other matters and scientific communities whose funding is dependent on the support of those political interests that our doom is upon us and we must stop doing anything.

In no way will this turn out to be the same as most issues in popular science, where there is an underlying trend that we should consider changing, but whose likely effects will not be fully understood without much more research and in any case will occur subtly over a period of many years.

If you truly think that modern "science" isn't influenced at all by politics, you really need to read about what happened behind the scenes before that IPCC report was published. You could start by looking at the legal action some of the scientists named as contributors took to try to get their names removed because they didn't want to be associated with it. Then you could look at the funding arrangements for the strongest supporters.

I'm not saying the phenomenon of global warming is completely made up. I'm not saying we shouldn't be watching what's happening, considering our role in it, and adjusting our behaviour if necessary. Nowhere did I say any of these things, despite what several knee-jerk respondents seem to think I wrote.

What I am saying is that we shouldn't panic over every little story about something this year being different to something last year, and go all hyper as if the world is about to end. As others have noted, the possibility of global warming has been on the scientific radar for decades. If it is such a great and immediate threat to humanity, the scientific community has been remarkably restrained for an awfully long time given that suddenly this is the top item on the agenda and they are falling over themselves to tell us how much trouble we are in. The science didn't change that quickly; remember, the IPCC report was essentially a huge survey paper, not a whole load of original research that told us we'd been off by orders of magnitude in our previous knowledge and modelling or something. What changed quickly was the politics.

Yes, no reason to discuss a contentious topic when "Anonymous Coward" already knows the truth...

Let's look at the motives of either side and see what's really going on. The Al Gores of the world have a personality order commonly referred to as "Chicken Little" and are so full of self-importance they feel the need to save the world. The idiots on the opposite extreme hate to be bothered by facts and science (hey, if it ain't in the Bible...), so they regurgitate a bunch of phony old-wives-tales they heard on Rush Limbaugh. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and thus is worthy of discussion.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

The argument can easily be made that over the last ten to twenty years we have moved from a consensus of there-is-no-warming to a consensus of global-warming. One might argue that a few determined scientists with excellent data managed this swing in just a few short years.

But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age. These people have a poor track record with predictions, but always seem ready with recommendations for how to behave.

Only history will prove them right or wrong. Prior to that, we are just running around with our hands in the air like chicken-little and demanding that massive works are undertaken to shore up the sky. Had we done this for global-cooling in the 1970s, we would have wasted a lot of money and resources.

I would suggest that the global warming crowd make a track of predictions for average surface, ocean and atmospheric temperatures for the next ten years. They should be able to predict the average within a margin of error EACH year on the way to that goal. If they can select the measurement criteria and firmly state their predictions... then we can observe their accuracy and react accordingly as the reality of the situation unfolds.

Yeah. Better to sit on your ass and do nothing until you have 100% proof and it's too late to bother changing your ways anyway. That's the spirit. If a car is coming towards you at 100 miles an hour and at 50ft away a phycisist says "There's a very good chance that car isn't going to stop in time, maybe you should move out of the way" do you tell him you want to be 100% sure before you move?

On the other hand, there is a non-zero chance that when you leave your home to go to work tomorrow morning, you will be run over by a truck. You could guarantee that you will avoid this fate by staying home. Do you do so?

The difference is just the numbers. In one case, we know the impact is very likely; in the other, it is very unlikely. In one case, the downside of making the "safe" choice is negligible; in the other, it probably costs you your job.

I rather doubt that an informed, object viewer of the current evidence on global warming would consider the situation anything like either of these extremes.

For the record, I also rather doubt any of the people expressing such strong views in this Slashdot discussion are even remotely qualified to do so. Heck, looking at some of the comments, I would be surprised if the majority of people here even know the basic science to understand what is being discussed rather than regurgitating the passionately held views of whoever's position statement they read most recently.

Well that's certainly a hypothesis worth investigating. Thankfully people other than yourself did actually think about that one, and have done a significant amunt of research on the amount of solar variation and how much of the change in global average temperature over the last century or so is attributable to those variations. The short answer is that, while solar variation has contributed (around 30% according to the IPCC) it can't fully account for the observed temperature changes. Indeed, solar variation flattened off in the last few decades, while temperature continued to rise see here [wikipedia.org].

Naturally occuring changes in the planetary atmosphere (as has happened before on this planet)?

An interesting hpothesis; perhapsthe dramatic rise in CO2 has nothing to do with humans. Fortunately, again, other people thought of this possibility and actually did the research. Since fossil fuels have rather distinctive isotope ratios we can gauge how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel burning by analysing the changing isotope ratios of atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately your hypothesis just isn't borne out; humans are responsible for the most recent dramatic rise in levels of atmospheric CO2.

But you get the point - when we at least have an educated guess as to the 'why'...

But we do have an educated guess as to why, significant amounts of research into that, and the alternative possibilities you suggest have been explored, and the results are that, to the very best of our current understanding, anthropogenic CO2 (and to a lesser degree other anthropogenic greenhouse gases) are a very significant factor -- indeed, the most significant -- in causing the observed increase in global average temperature. That rise in temperature is easily the prime candidate for blame with regard to melting arctic sea ice.

But at a scale a lot greater than the human one, our sun is growing fast. A couple hundredths of a percent every decade. So our faith is there. As the sun will grow larger and larger, our planet is going to heat more and more, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Bzzzztt!!! I call Bullsh-t.

WTF are you talking about? The sun is growing larger? Why would you pull something so incredibly obviously wrong out of your arse, and why would anybody be dumb enough to mod this up?